Abstract

We argue that the conjectured dark matter in the Universe may be endowed with a new kind of gravitational charge that couples via a short-range gravitational interaction mediated by a massive vector field. A model is constructed that assimilates this concept into ideas of current inflationary cosmology. The model is also consistent with the observed behaviour of galactic rotation curves according to Newtonian dynamics. The essential idea is that stars composed of ordinary (as opposed to dark) matter experience Newtonian forces due to the presence of an all-pervading background of massive gravitationally charged cold dark matter. The novel gravitational interactions are predicted to have a significant influence on pre-inflationary cosmology. The precise details depend on the nature of a gravitational Proca interaction and the description of matter. A gravitational Proca field configuration that gives rise to attractive forces between dark matter charges of like polarity exhibits homogeneous isotropic eternal cosmologies that are free of cosmological curvature singularities thus eliminating the horizon problem associated with the standard big-bang scenario. Such solutions do, however, admit dense hot pre-inflationary epochs each with a characteristic scale factor that may be correlated with the dark matter density in the current era of expansion. The model is based on a theory in which a modification of Einsteinian gravity at very short distances can be expressed in terms of the gradient of the Einstein metric and the torsion of a non-Riemannian connection on the bundle of linear frames over spacetime. Indeed, we demonstrate that the genesis of the model resides in a remarkable simplification that occurs when one analyses the variational equations associated with a broad class of non-Riemannian actions.